9. Planning what to buy¶
Module
Part of Purchasing & Suppliers. If your plan does not include it, these screens are not in your menus.
The replenishment list¶
Planning → Replenishment. What to order, and how much.
The reorder point is calculated, not typed in. It is average daily demand measured from what has actually shipped, multiplied by the supplier's lead time, plus a safety margin for how variable that demand is. The Service level dropdown at the top sets how much safety margin: 95% is the default.
Items are grouped by urgency — stocked out, critical, reorder, ok, no demand — with a count against each. By default you only see what needs attention; tick Show everything to include the healthy items.
| Column | What to read into it |
|---|---|
| Daily demand | Carries a "rising" or "falling" tag when the trend has moved more than 20% |
| Cover | How many days the stock you have will last at that rate |
| Suggest | The quantity to order. A "capped" tag means it was reduced to what can realistically sell before the shelf life runs out |
| Confidence | Low confidence means the demand history is thin or lumpy — hover it for the reason |
Note
This screen does not raise a purchase order. It gives you a number and the argument behind it; you raise the order in Transactions → Purchases.
Understanding a suggestion¶
Click Why? on any row. You get the calculation line by line — demand over 30 days and over 90, the blended forecast, the trend, how many days in the last 90 actually had any demand, the lead time, the safety stock, the resulting reorder point, and the suggested quantity — plus a bar chart of daily demand.
Two things are worth knowing when you read it:
- Demand counts shipments, not orders. An order placed and never sent does not count as demand.
- A tall bar with long gaps either side is lumpy demand from a few large orders. The average is arithmetically right and operationally misleading — the chart is there so you can see that for yourself.
Watch out
If the supplier lead time on the item record is wrong, the reorder point is wrong. That is the single field most worth checking.
Stock at risk¶
Planning → At Risk & Expiring. The other half of the question: replenishment says what to buy, this says what should not have been bought.
- Slow moving — stock with more cover than it has shelf life, and stock with no demand at all.
- Lots expiring within 90 days — with the days left tagged, and tagged as a warning under 30.
The value at risk is shown in bold at the top.
Standard costs and price variance¶
Planning → Standard Costs. An item can be given an expected cost, effective from a date. Items without one keep using average cost exactly as before.
A change is a new effective-dated row; the previous one is closed, never edited, so differences already recorded against it are not restated.
Planning → Price Variance then shows the gap between what an item was expected to cost and what was actually paid, recognised when the goods arrive. Favourable and unfavourable are shown separately as well as netted — a small net figure can hide large errors in both directions.
Freight, duty and handling¶
Planning → Landed Costs. Putting the cost of getting goods here into the cost of the goods themselves.
- Choose the Item receipt the cost relates to.
- Type the Cost type — freight, duty, handling.
- Enter the Amount, the Currency and the Rate.
- Choose how to spread it in Allocate by — value, quantity or weight.
- Click Record.
- Click Allocation on the new row, then Preview posting to see how it lands.
- When you are satisfied, click Apply.
The capitalised share moves into the cost of the units still on hand, so the next time they are sold it goes with them.
Note
Whatever share belongs to units already sold cannot be added to stock — their cost has already been recorded — so it is expensed and shown to you separately. And a landed cost cannot be applied twice: the button is disabled once it has been, because applying again would double the cost of every unit.